Synthetic Happiness Definition

What makes us happy? Is it winning the lottery? Going to Disney World with your best friend? Or even losing weight? Well of course these things may give us a form of happiness, but what most people do not know is that there is another form of happiness that we can make all by ourselves, no thrilling intervention needed. In fact, the human brain has the capacity to create synthetic happiness. Therefore, human beings can experience two kinds of happiness, natural and synthetic, but neither one is inferior to the other.

Natural happiness is what most human beings are referring to when describing the feeling. But the less popular alternative is called synthetic happiness. Synthetic means noting or pertaining to compounds formed through a chemical

To prove these differences there is a theory called the cognitive dissonance theory, or the “free choice paradigm”. The theory asserts that people often have two conflicting or inconsistent cognitions which produce a state of tension or discomfort (Sharot). People are then motivated to reduce the discomfort, or dissonance, often in the easiest manner possible (Cognitive). This theory can easily be used to prove synthetic happiness. Say you gathered a group of regular people and asked them to rate a series of paintings from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. After they have all ranked them you tell each person that you some extra paintings on hand and they can take one of them home. You tell each individual that you only have the paintings they chose for the third and fourth ranking. Naturally each person says they will have the third one because they liked that painting a little more than the fourth one. When they go home every single person says that they are glad they chose the one they did, because they realize how much they dislike the other one when they were in the process of deciding which one to take home. This proves that even when they did not get the painting they preferred the most they found a way to be content and happy with the one they received because they contemplated the attributes of the painting to another painting they disliked more than the other. This proves that people can experience synthetic